"I don't want them around," he had said, almost shouting.
"I understand, Simon," she had said, and had gone away.
So there was nothing of Patrick in the old nursery under the eaves; and not very much of the other children, after all. When this had been Bee's own nursery it had been ugly and individual and furnished largely with rejections from the other parts of the house. It had patterned linoleum, and a rag rug, and a cuckoo clock, and crazy basket chairs, and a clothes-horse, and a deal table covered with a red rep tablecloth trimmed with bobbles and marked with ink-stains; and coloured prints of «Bubbles» and similar masterpieces hung against a cabbage-rose wallpaper. But Nora had done it over, so that it became an illustration from a homemaker magazine, in powder-blue and white, with a wallpaper of nursery-rhyme characters. Only the cuckoo clock had stayed.
The children had been happy there, but had left no mark on it. Now that it was empty and tidy, it looked just like something in a furniture shop window.
She had gone back to her own room, baffled and sick at heart, and had packed a small bag for her use in the morning. To-morrow she must go up to town and face this new emergency in the history of the Ashbys.
"Do you believe, yourself, that it is Patrick?" she had asked.
But Mr. Sandal could give her no assurance.
"He has not the air of a pretender," he allowed. "And if he is not Patrick, then who is he? The Ashby family resemblance has always been abnormally strong. And there is no other son of this generation."
"But Patrick would have written," she said.
That is the thought she always went back to. Patrick would never have left her in grief and doubt all those years. Patrick would have written. It couldn't be Patrick.